You Have a Match(77)
We fill up the next few hours talking about nothing and everything. Savvy tells me about growing up in Medina with oddball rich parents in a typical rich town—about things like trick-or-treating at Bill Gates’s house, or going inner-tubing on Lake Washington on her friends’ parents’ boats, and stressing out all year about winning a Hula-Hoop contest at the Medina Days festival every summer. She tells me how she and Mickey met through an art class they took in second grade, inseparable ever since. She tells me she’s secretly really into Lord of the Rings, and that the same year Leo tortured me and Connie by trying to send coded messages in Elvish, she’d been learning it with him.
I tell her about the mini-adventure trips Poppy would take me on—how we’d drive out to Snoqualmie Falls to photograph the waterfall, or to Mount Saint Helens to squint at it through the fog and watch the seismic activity tracker jut up and down in the museum. I tell her how badly I’d wanted a sibling, and how my parents told me about Brandon by taking me out for cupcakes, and that somewhere in the archive there’s a video of me bursting into happy tears and getting cookie dough frosting up my nose. I tell her about all of them—Brandon and Mason and Asher—and their little quirks, like how Brandon is obsessed with different kinds of knots and keeps experimenting on our sneakers, or how Mason recently discovered his passion for guzzling large amounts of milk and burping out pop songs, or how Asher has an almost eerie knack for remembering where everyone puts their stuff down, so things are never lost for more than a minute when he’s around.
It’s the kind of stuff that fills in the edges, like we were whole people to each other but now the colors of us are a little brighter. It’s the kind of stuff we would have told each other over the next two weeks, except crammed into two muddy hours occasionally interrupted by one of us groaning about how hungry we are or how badly we need to pee.
“I wonder if I’ll ever get to meet them,” Savvy says at one point, when I finish telling her how Asher got so enthusiastic blowing out Brandon’s birthday candles that he almost set the house on fire.
It’s nearing noon, the heat settling in low in our little ditch. From our shadows, our hair has identically poofed up to full frizz potential. I touch mine absentmindedly, mulling over Savvy’s words and wondering the same.
“I hope so.”
Three weeks ago the idea made me queasy and possessive. But we’ve pushed so far into each other’s lives, it seems strange that she might not be there, or that there will be parts she can’t see—at least not until our parents either make a big decision, or the boys get old enough to find out about Savvy on their own. I know it’s not my place to tell them. But that doesn’t make the disappointment sting any less.
“Do you think they’d like me?”
“Another big sister to torture? They’d have a damn field day.” I smile at the thought, and it’s the first time getting sent home hasn’t felt like the end of the world. I really do miss those twerps. “That is, if they aren’t too busy trying to kidnap Rufus. They’ve been begging for a dog since—”
And, then, as if his name summoned him, we hear a distinct woof! that can only belong to Rufus.
Savvy snaps to attention so fast she looks like a human jack-in-the-box. “Rufus!” she calls up. “You beautiful, stupid, ridiculous—”
“Girls?”
It’s my mom. I’m on my feet in an instant, and Savvy and I open our mouths to yell some variation of the same thing—be careful—but we’re both so flustered that Savvy only manages to squeak and I say something in gibberish and all of it gets drowned out by Rufus’s barking anyway.
“Maggie, watch out!”
“Oh my,” I hear my mom gasp. Savvy and I wince, half expecting my mom to slide down here with us, but instead she says, “Thank you.”
Pietra doesn’t respond, because by then other voices are joining the fray. She and my mom are calling down to us, and our dads are calling from somewhere not too far off, and we’re calling back, and the whole thing is a clusterfuck of yelling before Savvy manages to trump everyone by shouting, “Does anyone have any food?”
“Are you okay?” Pietra asks instead.
“We’re fine,” Savvy answers.
“Abby?”
“Just hangry.”
Which is really all I can think of until someone tosses a Luna Bar down, and I, like the colossal, dehydrated idiot I am, try to catch it with the arm on my busted-up side and end up yelping like a Chihuahua. Savvy catches it out from under me and has it unwrapped and in her mouth so fast that I have no idea what she says next, but it sounds an awful lot like she just promised to give the name Luna to her firstborn.
“How far down are you?” Pietra calls.
“Not that far—maybe ten feet?” I guess. “But don’t come too close, you’ll slip right down.”
There’s more talking above us, the muffled noise of a decision getting made, and made fast. Savvy and I glance at each other in surprise—our parents are actually talking to one another.
“Dale is going to get help, girls,” my mom tells us. “Sit tight.”
“How did this happen?” Pietra asks.
“I thought it might be fun to spend the night in a ditch,” Savvy calls up, with the most impressive eye roll I’ve ever seen.